Today we are excited to announce the release of the brand and campaign management solution template for Twitter. Imagine you are an event manager who has spent the past few months planning a conference, lining up speakers, and coordinating catering, venues, and transportation. The big week is approaching, and you want to make sure everything goes smoothly. You want to understand what is well received and respond to negative sentiment immediately. You want to recognize which topics related to your event are trending and how those change across time. You want to find your biggest influencers, fans and critics.

Now imagine that you can set up sophisticated analytics that could answer all those questions for you in the space of five minutes.

Our new brand and campaign management solution template will help you do just that. Whether you manage an event, product, or marketing campaign, you can use our template to quickly and easily do analytics on top of Twitter data. All you will need to get started are Twitter credentials, the search terms you want to track, and an Azure subscription. (Don’t worry if you don’t have one – we help you get started with a trial as well).

Getting Started

The first part of our experience is an installer that guides you through setting up a solution template. We prompt you for Twitter and Azure credentials, and ask you for the search terms in which you are interested. All that is left to do now is hit Run, wait a few minutes for the pipeline to get set up, and download a Power BI Desktop file that comes with pre-defined reports.

Behind the scenes, the solution template spins up a total of three Azure Services:

A ‘Logic App’ that pulls Twitter data in real time

An ‘Azure Function’ that enriches each tweet using machine learning

An Azure SQL database which comes with a pre-defined schema for your Twitter data

As soon as the solution template gets spun up, Logic Apps will start scanning for new tweets and you should almost immediately see data appear inside your Power BI reports.

Exploring the solution

The Twitter template originated from an amazing collaboration between the solution template team and Microsoft researchers. (You can learn more about the work of the principal researcher, Chris White, here). Microsoft researchers have spent time creating a ‘Social Command Center’ and authoring sophisticated custom visuals like the network graph below (snapshot taken from solution template reports):

The Twitter solution template leverages a number of components from the ‘Social Command Center’ and packages them up for users to easily consume. Reports like the one above allow users to effortlessly explore networks of interconnected authors and hashtags. It becomes easy to organically spot patterns of trending topics, and slice data by authors and time.

The data has also been enriched through natural language processing techniques like sentiment analysis. This means we can help users quickly identify areas of concern, such as authors who are consistently posting negative tweets about campaigns or products. You can even drill down into the raw tweets thanks to the awesome ‘Strippet Browser’ visual created by our favorite Microsoft research team.

Extensibility

Every part of the solution template is also completely extensible and customizable. We have Partners who are fully skilled up in the brand and campaign management solution who can help you out today. This means if you have additional requirements – whether it’s to mash up data from other sources like Facebook, enrich the data using ML techniques like entity extraction or correlate your data with campaigns -- they can all be achieved by either engaging our Partners or tweaking things yourself!

Try it out & let us know

Go ahead and check out the Twitter solution template by visiting our page. You can play around with an embedded sample report that tracks Power BI, or watch a video that walks you through each report page. Finally, you can set things up by clicking the Install Now button. Please give it a go and let us know what you think. You can reach the team by e-mailing us at PBISolnTemplates@microsoft.com or leaving a comment on the Power BI Community page for solution templates.